The central idea of object-based broadcasting is in the title - it’s all about objects. You can think of an object as any kind of individual media asset: a video clip, an audio clip, a still image, a caption. These are the fundamental objects that programmes are built from. With object-based broadcasting, these objects are broadcast to everyone, along with information describing the ways in which they can be reassembled. Your device can then use that information to reassemble the programme to suit your preferences, device capabilities and viewing environment.

That's not always easy though, as we face an advertising industry ruled by metrics, where there are often ten spreadsheet-wielding interns between us and someone who might actually care about our creativity. In our experiments with more traditional algorithmic display advertising to monetize the raw traffic numbers we do have, we keep running up against what appears to be a universal truth: the bulk of the global internet ad ecosystem runs on trash.

Ad blocking emerged over a year ago as a major threat to digital publishing, most acutely in Europe, which has long boasted the highest ad-blocking rates in the world. But now, European publishers are seeing ad blocking rates stabilize and even drop.

Medium wants to straddle the divide between media and tech — to be both a platform (tech) and a publisher (media). This can place it in an awkward position: Institutionally, is it on the closed-ranks side of the “new class of industrialists” of the tech industry, to whom the question of Airbnb’s liability in the deaths of its guests is already settled? Or is it an editorially independent media company with a mandate to ask uncomfortable questions?

What we’re seeing is the content makers being dangerously moved to oneside. Our relationship is now with the article but the content is monetized by the distributor ( Facebook, Apple News , Twitter). We’re no longer browsing the New York Times, we’re dipping in and out of pieces.
Everything is moving to the topmost surface, the ad money, the data, the relationship.

Essentially, Williams said the future of publishing is not in individual websites but in large platforms (such as Medium, he hopes, as well as Facebook, maybe Apple, and others to be determined). Ultimately, only they can offer wide distribution to large groups of people, he believes.

More than that, Williams thinks the key will be providing social context for content. Perhaps outside of huge traffic drivers such as Buzzfeed, he contends, most publishers can’t make much money from running their own websites, especially with current ad formats such as banners.

The more of our digital economy we leave to formulas instead of fairness, say regulators, the more we risk creating two digital economies—one for the rich, filled with opportunity, and one for the poor, filled with risk and little reward.